White Rock Vineyards assesses fire damage, looks to rebuild

White Rock Vineyards in Napa lost an estimated 15 to 20 percent of their total wine inventory in the wildfires.

White Rock Vineyards in Napa lost an estimated 15 to 20 percent of their total wine inventory in the wildfires.

Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle

Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle

Image
1of/9

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 9

White Rock Vineyards in Napa lost an estimated 15 to 20 percent of their total wine inventory in the wildfires.

White Rock Vineyards in Napa lost an estimated 15 to 20 percent of their total wine inventory in the wildfires.

Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle

White Rock Vineyards assesses fire damage, looks to rebuild

1 / 9

Back to Gallery

For the Vandendriessche family, there was no warning.

The family was at home on Sunday night, on their property off Soda Canyon Road where their estate winery, White Rock Vineyards, stands. When the fires broke out just above them, on Atlas Peak, they didn’t hear about it on the news. They saw it.

Michael Vandendriessche, who manages the family’s vineyards, was the first to notice the flames moving fast down the ridgeline, directly toward their property. He awoke his wife and children then ran next door to wake up his parents, Henri and Claire. Within three minutes, they were all out.

“It spread so fast, nobody could get their minds around it,” said Heather Conlin, White Rock’s general manager.

Henri and Claire Vandendriessche founded White Rock in 1977, but the estate’s history dates back to 1870, when one Dr. J Pettingill planted one of Napa Valley’s earliest vineyards there. Under the stewardship of Henri and Claire — and now their sons, Michael and Christopher — White Rock has quietly established itself as one of Napa’s greatest unsung wineries.

When the White Rock team was able to get back on the property on Monday, there was some good news: The sheep, chickens and dogs who live on the property were safe.

The bad news: the Vandendriessche family homes, as well as the property’s barns and sheds, were burned to the ground. And the cave where they make their wine looked ravaged from the outside, with hundreds of shattered wine bottles spilling out from its central door.

“We do bottle and barrel storage in the cave,” Conlin explained, “so we carry easily two to five vintages in that cave at any time.”

Clayton Kirchoff, assistant winemaker for Hudson Vineyards, whose wines are made at White Rock, had been at his parents’ house in Clarksburg on Sunday night. His own home is just a short distance through the hillsides from the winery. When he returned to Napa on Monday, road closures blocked him from driving through the Silverado Trail to the winery or to his home.

So he walked.

“I saw a couple of the Hudson tanks that were outside (the cave), completely blackened,” Kirchoff said. “One of them had plastic that burned into it.” He’s not sure whether they’ll be salvageable. “I tried to estimate in my mind, but those tanks have about $300,000 to $500,000 worth of wine apiece.”

He got to work, quickly doing punchdowns, trying to salvage what he could of the fermentations.

Kirchoff’s house, too, had burned, along with all of his possessions. With one notable exception: a classic car that he had built with his father when he was in high school. “It was a bit of a consolation that the car was missed,” he said.

Assessing the total damage to the White Rock caves was difficult in the first couple of days. But while the front of the cave looked demolished, it was clear that the areas near the back of the cave, nestled into the hillside, were still intact.

Christopher Vandendriessche, Michael’s brother and the White Rock winemaker, estimated that they’d lost about 15 to 20 percent of their total wine inventory.

The arrival of a generator on Thursday restored power to the winery so that Christopher could light the cave and keep the ongoing fermentations cool. “We tasted all the fermented wines today and are very excited to see they are excellent,” he wrote in a text message.

The Vandendriessches are committed to getting the winery back into business as usual as soon as they can.

“The family — they’ve been farming up there for 40 years,” said Conlin. “This is one of the rare pre-Prohibition estates in Napa. They in many ways really haven’t been skipping a beat. It’s ‘let’s get back in there, clean up, move forward.’”